Part 20 (1/2)

Church's expression was flat. ”It means that bodies may be harder to identify.”

The silence was fierce.

Church eventually added, ”And our infrastructure is working on a vacation schedule except for police, who will be challenged with crowd control and traffic management. If there is some kind of coordinated terrorist action-either by a foreign power or something homegrown-this is a ripe opportunity.”

Interlude Six St. Michael's Hospital Baltimore, Maryland Four Years Ago Artemisia Bliss sat in a car and watched a hospital burn.

Twenty-five minutes ago there had been more than one hundred and eighty-six civilians in the east wing of the hospital. Doctors and nurses, staff, patients, and visitors.

Now there was only flame and smoke. And a few fading screams.

Thirty-one minutes ago EMTs brought in a gunshot victim named Javad Mustapha, a suspected terrorist who'd been shot by a Baltimore police officer during a joint police/Homeland task force raid on a cell by the docks. Sergeant Dietrich told Bliss that several other terrorists were dead and some cops had been hurt. The E.R. was busy. But Javad Mustapha was definitely DOA.

Except that he wasn't.

Somehow he wasn't.

Impossibly, he wasn't.

The video-cam feed from the Baker Team agents who had intercepted Javad and accompanied him to the hospital was like something out of a fever dream. Horror show stuff.

Working on some sketchy intelligence that Javad might have been infected with some new kind of weaponized pathogen, Mr. Church ordered Baker Team to oversee the transport of his body to the hospital and the taking of all appropriate samples.

But something went wrong.

As the body was being transferred from a gurney, Javad suddenly woke up.

If that was even the right way to phrase it.

One moment he was slack, clearly dead from gunshot wounds, and then he sat up, grabbed the closest agent, and bit his throat. There was so much blood. Pints of red driven by that hydrostatic pressure, bathing Javad's face as he tore at the dying agent's windpipe and jugular.

The second agent drew his weapon and shot Javad in the side. Twice, three times.

But instead of collapsing, Javad turned and hurled himself at the agent. The Baker Team shooter fired twice more as he was borne to the floor, and the bullets punched all the way through Javad's stomach. One hit the ceiling and the other hit the pathologist in the chest.

The agent and Javad rolled around on the floor and for a moment the helmet cam showed nothing but wildly blurred movement.

The screams, though.

The screams.

They told what was happening with grotesque eloquence.

Aunt Sallie was in charge of the Tactical Operations Center at the Hangar and she immediately ordered backup into the hospital. The rest of Baker and Charlie teams raced inside. Twenty of the best special operators in the world.

Their helmet cams were all working.

Bliss and Hu watched all of this from inside a DMS SUV parked outside the hospital where they waited for the collected samples and also for the computer records from the task force raid. They were not even aware they were holding hands, but later each of them would have bruises on their fingers.

The car's TV monitors played the images from all of those helmet cams. They saw more impossible things. The two agents that had been bitten came surging out of a stairwell and fell upon their comrades. The incoming agents did not fire.

Not at first.

Instead they stared in total, numb, uncomprehending shock at what was happening.

Then they tried to help.

They slung their rifles and stepped in to try and pull the infected agents away from the newly bitten. It was an act of brotherhood, of fellows.h.i.+p, of compa.s.sion.

And they died for it as the infected turned on them. A small bite here, a bigger bite there. Men staggered backward from the melee, bleeding and screaming.

The other agents panicked.

Some retreated, totally unprepared for this, unable to respond, their training lost in the madness of the moment.

Others, either colder or hardier men, opened fire.

Aiming for legs. Shooting to wound. To disable that which could not be disabled.

The injured bled out.

Died.

And came back.

Javad joined the frenzy. Killing, wounding, and then loping down the hallway, gibbering and moaning, seeking fresh prey.

Some of the agents followed. Living and dead.

There was continuous gunfire for as long as ammunition and life remained.

And then, when there was no one left who looked or acted like a DMS soldier, the real slaughter began. There was so much life here. Even sickness was life. One hundred and eighty-six civilians.

Soon, one hundred and eighty-six monsters.

Then Alpha Team showed up.

By now the hospital was lost, overrun.

Mr. Church and Gus Dietrich were there. So was Major Courtland. And Bliss almost screamed as Javad and a knot of infected burst through a doorway and attacked the three senior DMS staff.

Dietrich drew his sidearm and began firing double-taps to the chest. Infected fell from the impact of the bullets, but they did not stay down. He and Courtland stood side by side, firing, reloading, firing.

Javad ran around them. Dietrich twisted and hit him twice with rounds in the side of the chest. It should have exploded the man's heart and lungs. But Javad drove straight for Mr. Church, hands reaching, red mouth wide to bite.

Church stood his ground, his face grave but without fear. As Javad lunged at him, Church slapped the reaching arms to one side and fired a Taser point-blank into Javad's mangled face. The flechettes buried themselves in the dead terrorist's cheeks and the gun sent two joules of electrical power into what remained of the central nervous system of the infected.